The role of séméiotique in François Delsarte's aesthetics

Iris Smith Fischer*

The role of séméiotique in FrançoisDelsarte’s aesthetics

DOI 10.1515/sem-2015-0153

Abstract: This article introduces the aesthetic theory of François Delsarte (1811–1870) and his conception of semiotics. Delsarte created his “applied aesthetics”as a modern scientific method for artists, particularly performers, to investigatethe nature of human being. Delsarte’s approach to performance involved theactor in observing human behavior, interpreting it through categories of voice,gesture, and language, and rendering it in an expansive display of types.Delsarte’s applied aesthetics involves the performer’s attention to signs andsign action, a study he called séméiotique. We see Delsarte’s program for inquiryinto truth in what I call the actor’s task, which develops his or her human beingthrough observation, analysis, and creation. This was Delsarte’s “orthopedicmachine for correcting crippled intellects” – the crippled intellects being thoseintellectuals and conservatory teachers whose ideas on aesthetics he found to beneither systematic nor attuned to God’s reason. While it is well known in theatreand dance scholarship that Delsarte’s ideas and methods advanced the trainingof actors, dancers, and orators, particularly in the United States, my paperinstead introduces him as a voice in nineteenth-century thinking on signs andsemiosis. Delsarte’s aesthetics are firmly based in Thomist assumptions about atriune god whose nature is reflected imperfectly in man. Yet it is striking thatDelsarte characterizes the sign relation as mediated in a modern sense, prior toCharles Peirce’s development of his own triadic sign relation, and semiotics as amodern method of scientific inquiry.

Keywords: Delsarte, Peirce, aesthetics, semiotic, inquiry, actor training

In Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 realist novel Madame Bovary, the title characterpersuades her husband, a provincial doctor, to treat a boy’s misshapen foot byencasing it in a box. Designed to straighten the foot and restore the boy to anormal life, the device proves to be a fraud, and his now gangrenous leg must beamputated. Flaubert juxtaposes his laconic narration of this disastrous experi-ment with Emma Bovary’s self-recriminations over her increasing

*Corresponding author: Iris Smith Fischer, Department of English, University of Kansas,Lawrence, USA, E-mail: [email protected]

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disappointment in her husband. The boy is fitted with a wooden leg, a mucholder technology, to which he quickly adapts. This episode, like others inFlaubert’s path-breaking novel, was intended to shock the reading public.They were accustomed, like the character Emma Bovary herself, to the idealizedscenes of Romantic poetry and fiction. Flaubert found such idealism dangerous,particularly in the realms of science and medicine.

Yet aesthetic idealism persisted in literature, as in everyday life, to the endof the century. Poetry, fiction and drama, many readers felt, should present anennobled picture of life that would refine the sensibilities and habits of itsreaders. This aesthetic idealism “merged aesthetics and ethics, and usuallyreligion too, since most (but not all) idealists also believed that God was thehighest incarnation of the trinity of beauty, goodness, and truth” (Moi 2006: 4).Many aesthetic idealists saw the artist as a progressive force in society; alliedwith the scientist and the businessman, the artist led by offering ideas andinspiration that would improve human lives. In a new incarnation of the cen-turies-old dispute between the ancients and the moderns, mid-nineteenth-cen-tury aesthetic idealism looked backward in order to look forward.

In 1856 François Delsarte, who was born in northern France not far from thesetting of Flaubert’s novel, was established in Paris as a teacher of voice anddeclamation, well known for his remarkable course in “applied aesthetics.” UnlikeFlaubert’s secular critique of aesthetic idealism, Delsarte sought to test suchidealism, as he found it in established schools of performance training, withmodern scientific methods. He felt that aesthetics brought man closer to God,but only through the right sort of artistic and scientific inquiry. Delsarte developeda mechanism, in a sense, that would allow the performer to modernize the ancientarts that best account for human-nature. The notion that a “machine,” correctlydesigned and used, could straighten a foot – or a mind – informed Delsarte’sdevelopment of applied aesthetics, a method he employed in training actors,vocalists, and orators, in observation and artistic creation. Philosopher and nove-list Raymond Brucker deemed his friend Delsarte’s innovative and unconventionalapproach to performance training “an orthopedic machine to straighten crippledintellects” (cited in Zorn 1968: 117; also in; Shawn 1973 [1963]: 21). UnlikeFlaubert’s fictional machine, Delsarte’s system was innovative and successful inits day. Celebrated actors and artists sought out his studio to learn his methods.The crippled intellects in this case belonged to Delsarte’s own teachers, and toacademic instruction in general, which emphasized imitation of behaviors mod-eled by each instructor and produced a confusion of arbitrary, conflicting choicesin their students’ acting. Delsarte’s teaching methods were indebted not to hisown vocal training so much as to the intellectual framework he developed. Thissystem was based on his study of human nature – physical, mental, and spiritual.

2 Iris Smith Fischer



1 Delsarte’s significance

This paper1 introduces Delsarte’s aesthetics and the role of semeiotic(séméiotique) in it. Throughout, I weigh key aspects of Delsarte’s séméiotiqueagainst the theory of semiotic developed by Charles Sanders Peirce.2 While it iswell known that Delsarte’s ideas and methods advanced the training of perfor-mers in France and, later, in the United States, my paper instead treats him asan earlier nineteenth-century voice in the developing understanding of signs,not merely as elements for classification but as sign processes that offer amethod of inquiry.

In the 1880s, the philosopher Charles S. Peirce studied applied aestheticsas it had been communicated to the American public by one of Delsarte’sstudents – the acting teacher, playwright, designer, and director James SteeleMackaye. As Peirce worked on A Guess at the Riddle, he drafted an essay,published posthumously under the title “Trichotomic” (1888, EP 1), that relatedthe triadic categories on which Delsarte’s aesthetics is based to his own cate-gories of life and experience. The relations between Peirce’s ideas and those ofDelsarte allow me, in my larger project, to situate Peirce’s developing ideas onsemiotic as a method of scientific inquiry and to relate it to the contempora-neous movement in actor training, elocution, and physical culture calledAesthetic Expression, also known as American Delsartism or simply Delsarte.The movement, which began in the US around 1870 and flourished in the 1880sand 1890s, grew out of Mackaye’s and others’ interpretations of Delsarte’s workin Paris. Elena Randi argues convincingly that Delsarte was one of the firstmodern thinkers in acting theory.3 Certainly his ideas formed the basis for theoriginal curriculum of the first American acting studio, the Lyceum TheatreSchool, which became the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The AADA

1 The research for this article was made possible by a 2014 faculty fellowship from the NationalEndowment for the Humanities (FA-57755-14). My thanks to Germain Bienvenu, André deTienne, Richard Hardin, Elspeth Healey, Angela Moots, David Pfeifer, and Franck Waille fortheir assistance as I prepared the article. I am also indebted to my teachers Marvin Carlson,Matei Calinescu, and Thomas A. Sebeok. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.2 For convenience and clarity, I have rendered Delsarte’s séméiotique as “semeiotic” andPeirce’s “semiotic,” which appears in his writings along with other usages.3 While not directly asserting the modernity of Delsarte’s séméiotique, Elena Randi charac-terizes the actor’s task as that of “choos[ing] one hermeneutical slant and follow[ing] it from thebeginning to the end of the part,” producing an “elliptic translation” (or “sub-text”). Sheconcludes that Delsarte’s “actor’s art method anticipates, albeit in a small scale, the unifyingfeatures of the performance, which is one of the pivots of stage direction” in the twentiethcentury (Randi 2012: 244).

The role of séméiotique 3



has trained generations of actors and contributed to the creativity and influenceof American stage and film performance styles, but it seldom acknowledges itsroots in Delsartism. Delsarte’s ideas and methods took hold most firmly inmodern dance, most visibly in the work of Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham,and Ted Shawn. Shawn researched Delsarte intensively and disseminated hisideas, most notably in his book Every Little Movement (1954, rev. 1963), and thatinfluence can still be found in current dance and movement training. WhileDelsarte is now little known in US theatre scholarship,4 the resurgence ofinterest in his aesthetics among European scholars in the last thirty yearssuggests that, as with the growing comprehension of Peirce’s contributions toscientific method, it is time for scholars to consider the role and relevance ofDelsarte’s applied aesthetics in the historical development of semiotics.5

4 North American theatre scholarship on Delsarte and Delsartism has relied largely on theFrançois Delsarte papers held at the Hill Memorial Library (Louisiana State University). Work onthe collection was begun by Claude L. Shaver (1937) and his students, who translated keydocuments. Much of this work, undertaken in the 1930s and 1940s, remained unpublished astheatre scholarship in the post-World War II years turned to establishing the currency ofmodern drama and recent motivational approaches to acting and movement. After the 1968publication of The Essential Delsarte, edited by John W. Zorn, E. T. Kirby’s article “The DelsarteMethod: Three Frontiers of Actor Training” appeared in The Drama Review in 1972, pointing toDelsarte as a pioneer in performance kinesics and semiology (Kirby 1972: 62, 66). Yet only a fewdiscussions followed, such as James H. McTeague’s brief account (drawing largely on Shaver) ofDelsartist principles in Before Stanislavsky (1993). Reconsideration of Delsarte emerged onceagain in dance scholarship, primarily via the work of Nancy Lee Chalfa Ruyter, whose best-known book, The Cultivation of Body and Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Delsartism(1999), has provided a useful new starting point for research, both on the development ofDelsartism as a complicated set of US performance cultures and on their origins in Delsarte’sand others’ earlier practices.5 Among European theatre scholars who have contributed to a resurgence of interest inDelsarte are Alain Porte, Elena Randi, and Franck Waille. In 2012 Waille and Matthias Spohredited an important collection of essays about Delsarte’s semiotics, called “Dance of the Signs:Bicentennial of François Delsarte’s Birth,” as a special issue of Kodikas/Code. (The journal’seditor, Ernest W. B. Hess-Lüttich, has himself published extensively on theatre semiotics.) Moregenerally, as Ruyter notes,

Interest in the Delsarte work has developed in Europe as well as in the United States. Therehave been publications, conferences, and exhibitions in France and Italy; sponsorship bythe Centre National de la Danse in Paris of a translation into French of Shawn’s Every LittleMovement; and an issue of the Mime Journal devoted to Delsartian research. The latestevidence of the continuing importance of Delsarte’s work and that of his followers hasbeen the 2011 events in Stuttgart, Paris, and Padua to commemorate the 200 year anni-versary of Delsarte’s birth and to further research into and practice of the various aspectsof Delsartism. (Ruyter 2012: 294)




2 Tradition and innovation: A brief biography

François Alexandre Nicolas Chéri Delsarte (1811–1871) saw himself as anartist and an inquirer. Trained as an opera singer at the École royale demusique et declamation, Delsarte’s voice became damaged early on, and hespent most of his career training other vocalists. He read widely in medicine,political theory, and philosophy, with particular attention to aesthetics. Inlater years, he gave lectures and courses on his system of applied aestheticsto large audiences. In small-group sessions, Delsarte taught well-knownactors, such as Charles Macready and Rachel Félix, as well as clerics, writers,and artists. He spoke of art, not the arts, and of science rather than thesciences – seeing stage performance as a broad-based challenge to thehuman being rather than a specialist’s narrow focus on technique. Acting,done correctly, produced truth. Thus the actor as an artist must also be aninquirer. Delsarte considered himself as such from his earliest course in 1839to his final course in 1870, when he designated Steele Mackaye his intellec-tual heir (Delsarte c.1870).

Delsarte remained remarkably consistent over his thirty years of teaching.His views on vocal training ran counter to those of his conservatory teachers, aposition that deepened as the French academic world grew more specialized.Delsarte had turned to teaching in the 1830s after recovering from laryngealtuberculosis, an event that effectively ended his professional performancecareer. He focused his energies on learning the skills needed to teach a type oftheatrical and vocal art that would, in reviving the work of selected old masters,shape the aesthetics of the modern age. He studied physiology and phonology,did anatomical studies of the larynx, and devoted many hours to observation ofpeople’s physical behavior and social interactions in public. He sought todevelop scientific methods of observation, training, and performance thatwould inspire, refine, and teach. Delsarte distrusted institutional instruction invoice; he gave credit to few of his professors. One who received praise,Deshayes,6 revealed to him the importance of affinities, or “agreements betweengesture and the inflection of the voice,” which Delsarte deemed the moment ofhis “discovery … of his truly scientific method” (Harang 1945: 33, 38).Theparadoxical juxtaposition of Delsarte’s avant-garde attitudes with his adherenceto tradition and authority strongly marks his form of inquiry. In many ways it

6 This may have been François-Georges Fouques Deshayes (1733–1825), known as Desfontainesor Desfontaines-Lavallée, a French writer and playwright.




reflected the paradoxes of French society as it lurched back and forth betweenmonarchy and republic.

Ironically, Delsarte’s lifelong claim to scientific methods may have foundsupport in his conversion to Catholicism and involvement with the Paris churchof the Abbé Chatel. Established in 1835, Chatel’s independent Église catholiquefrançaise followed socialist principles derived from Henri de Saint-Simon’svision of a society transformed by scientific and technological advances. Saint-Simonism clearly influenced Delsarte’s ideas on the progressive role of the artist.Matei Calinescu notes that

Saint-Simon regarded artists, along with scientists and industrialists, as naturally destinedto be part of the trinitarian ruling elite in the ideal state … [T]he artist is the ‘man ofimagination’ and, as such, he is capable not only of foreseeing the future but also ofcreating it. His grandiose task is to take the ‘Golden Age’ of the past and project its magicglow into the future … the triumphant march toward the well-being and happiness of allmankind. (Calinescu 1977: 102)

Delsarte embraced the didactic role that Saint-Simon and his followers envi-sioned for the artist as leader. His conversion to Catholicism produced a newphilosophical orientation in his thinking about art and propelled him on amission to study, inquire, and teach (Waille 2011: 142). He felt compelled todevise a scientific method to investigate God’s principles in man, demon-strated most clearly by the human body (2011: 143). Delsarte’s was a quietrevolution, scarcely perceivable in French society at large. While Chatel wenton to support the workers’ uprisings of 1848, Delsarte became a teacher ofvoice who presented his students at private concerts for audiences of wealthyand well-born music lovers.

Delsarte seems to have been in greatest demand as an instructor between1845 and 1855. By championing Gluck’s concept of lyric tragedy, Delsarte furth-ered his own intent to create the future of performance from the genius of suchneglected artists. To this end he published the Archives of Song (Archives duChant), which documented songs and hymns, some ancient and medieval,which would give new life to lyric tragedy. Delsarte saw no distinction betweensecular and sacred music in his mission to use vocal performance for theindividual performer’s (and spectator’s) attainment of purity, enlightenment,and spiritual well-being.

As an inquirer, the Delsartean actor avoids conventional theatrical tech-niques, instead beginning with close observation of human behavior. In his1859 course, Delsarte rejects his contemporaries’ accounts of aesthetics as amere “assemblage of considerations on beauty”; instead, he identifies aes-thetics as “the study of the manifestations of feelings [sentiments]” (Delsarte




1859: A120). As an alternate or synonym he offers sensation, both of which canrefer to the external aspects of internal feelings. “The study of the manifesta-tions of feelings” suggests that Delsarte was keenly aware of the actor’s needto distinguish not just between the actor’s own feeling and the character’s, butalso between these two and the character’s affect or manifestation of feeling.Delsarte criticizes those who teach performers to match stage gestures toconventional concepts of emotion: “Love [is] a hidden substance, visibleonly by the sensory expressions which correspond to the unlimited numberof transformations to which you are susceptible and which give as manydifferent physiognomies. Here [your teachers] have reduced you to a term –here they have measured you – you who are infinity!” (Delsarte 1859: A121,adapted from; Levy 1940: 12). By such “infinite” manifestations appearing asgestural signs, the actor can reveal to the audience a complex inner life to thecharacter that is often not visible, within the world of the play, to the othercharacters. But truth in acting involves more, claims Delsarte. The playing ofthe fictional inner life must produce signs of inner lives as the actor andaudience presumably have experienced them – that is, as they are discoveredin their great variety in nature.

Here, then, lies an additional key to Delsarte’s significance in theatrehistory. As early as 1839 he championed a modern approach to the creation ofdramatic character, one that emphasized rigorous physical, mental, and spiri-tual preparation, a heightened realism both in terms of technique and artisticeffect, and the corresponding development of the actor as a human being.Thomas Leabhart points out that, in theatre history, Delsarte’s practices andprinciples were known to directors Constantin Stanislavsky, Sergei Volkonsky,and Mikhail Chekhov, and through them Jerzy Grotowski, all significant figuresin twentieth-century acting theory (Leabhart 2004–2005: 18–19). Delsarte’s pro-found influence on modern dance filtered into interdisciplinary theatre practicesof the 1960s and 1970s. Most recently, as scholarly interest in Delsarte re-emerged in the 1990s, several directors have revived his work as foundingprinciples for their own theatres.7

7 The chart “Héritages de Delsarte vers le monde de la danse moderne” in Anne-MarieDrouin-Hans (2011 [1991]: 64) includes well-known artists such as Pina Bausch, TrishaBrown, and the company Pilobolus. Among current directors of Delsarte-inspired theatresare Franck Waille, Luane Davis, and Joe Williams. Outside theatre, Delsarte’s account ofsign-creation connects him to modern science-based semiotics, particularly research onembodied cognition.




3 Applied aesthetics: Performance as orthopedicmachine

3.1 Delsarte’s mission

Delsarte began teaching in 1839. His first course, a “moral and scientific schoolof singing” (Neely 1942: 180),8 exhibited many of the traits that characterized histeaching throughout his career: a triadic metaphysical framework, based on aconcept of God as a single entity in three persons – father, son, and holy spirit; aparallel account of the human being as a whole organism characterized bymind, life, and spirit; and a division of performance into corresponding triadsindicating the expressive range of each part of the body, and the effects createdby their interactions. Notable from the first is Delsarte’s placing of man as thecentral focus of art, as well as his emphasis on bodily movement and gesture(not voice or language) as the most certain guide to the truthful representationof man. With this emphasis Delsarte casts the performer as embodied inquirer,consciously investigating the world through the lens of human being. HereDelsarte seems a rather subtle psychologist. In his 1865 speech to thePhilotechnic Society of Paris, he asks the audience to consider how an artwork moves them: “You admire it, gentlemen, when you re-find yourselves init; and if you applaud, it is only on the condition of your recognizing in itsomething of your own character” (Delsarte 1877 [1866]: 24). Far from beingdescribed as universally appealing, art provokes feeling only if it does not departfrom the habits, passions, and prejudices that form the viewer’s “stamp of …individuality” (Delsarte 1977 [1866]: 24).

As we will see, the actor’s task (as I call it) involves a kind of body-mapping:working from outside in, the actor observes the manifestations or signs of feelingin others; working at the same time from inside out, the actor consciouslyapplies his or her feelings and reactions. By means of Delsarte’s mapping ofthe human body, the actor can intuit as well as understand the rightness of hisor her own gestures and movements in order to create a truthful representation.In this way Delsarte’s applied aesthetics fulfills his mission of showing humanbeings to themselves because the actor addresses the complexities of humanfeeling, experience, and reasoning in terms of the body’s role as mediator. In asense, Delsarte is asking: how do feeling, body-life or sensation, and thought

8 My summary of Delsarte’s 1839 course is based on Neely 1942, who summarizes and trans-lates excerpts from a notebook written by several of Delsarte’s students and notated by Delsarte.The translation of the course title is my own.




function in man, understood as a reflection of God? To what extent can a humanbeing follow his sublime nature and approach perfection? Or, to what extent hasa human being’s animal nature drawn him away from the summum bonum – theideal of goodness, truth, and beauty? Delsarte seeks to represent human beingnot only if it approaches perfection but also if it is riddled with imperfection. Theactor embodies knowledge of man’s three natures (life, mind, and spirit) bymapping them onto his or her own body. In this way Delsarte sets out to craft anineteenth-century formulation of aesthetics, as he had inherited the conceptfrom the eighteenth-century thinkers who devised it.

3.2 The paradox of reason in Delsarte’s applied aesthetics

While as early as 1839 Delsarte had outlined applied aesthetics as the method bywhich the artist produces the sublime in art, by 1858 Delsarte’s course, based onhis developing theory of triadicity in man’s relations with God and nature, hadtaken on new dimensions. Having broadened his course’s scope from voicetraining to applied aesthetics, he was able to teach declamation – the recitationof verse or a dramatic scene – along with vocal music and acting. Speaking ofart rather than the arts (as he spoke of science rather than the sciences), histeaching drew not only well-known singers and actors, but also philosophers,musicians, and literary figures. After hearing Delsarte present his synoptictables, one listener wrote, “we understood … that divine harmony of thingswhose distant echo came formerly to the ear of Pythagor[as].” Dramatic truthwas to produce a path to knowledge: “Delsarte is above all … a grand andbeautiful mind in search of the truth, that he has revealed at least in part, for itis not given to one man to discover everything in entirety” (quoted in Harang1945:19, 64). Indeed, in the absence of a direct statement of scientific method,Delsarte’s critique of his conservatory teachers offers his sense of it: it consists ofa “community of belief” organized according to systematic principles andfounded on a “determined scientific basis.” Such a “school” would have “settledprinciples, … established doctrine, [and] … definite instruction” (Delsarte 1977[1866]: 39). None of these were employed in his own conservatory education, heclaimed, which operated according to chance, specifically the actor’s inspiration(or lack of it) and the vagaries of stage convention.

As attractive as Delsarte’s applied aesthetics, with its emphasis on methodicaltraining and inquiry into the relations ofmind, body, and spirit, has been tomodernartists, its underlying principles were bound to tradition and authority. At a timewhen scientific advances were changing public attitudes on human nature andman’s place in theworld, Delsarte insisted that reason should not be elevated above




other human faculties. How does Delsarte account for reason and why does hedistrust it? What is the paradoxical role of reason in the Delsartean actor’s task?Consider his definition of art:

Art is at the same time the acquaintance, possession, and free direction of agents by virtueof which are disclosed life, soul, and mind. It is the deliberately adapted application of thesymbol to the thing. Art is not, as is sometimes said, the imitation of nature; it is theidealistic reproduction of it. It is the synthetic relation of the scattered beauties of nature toa superior and definite type. (trans. from Delsarte 1859: A125)

What sort of acting would accord with this definition? Delsarte is working within thetradition of melodrama, an inclusive genre that extends from vaudeville sketches tofull-length plays, even to certain forms of opera. Melodrama involves the creation ofbroad character types. Nineteenth-century melodrama’s appeal lay in its emotionalrealism and physical sensation – if its characters seem artificial by today’s stan-dards, its inclusion of hitherto unmentionable social classes, rigorous plotting, andspectacular effects made it seem modern when it appeared early in that century.Popular melodrama, though, fell in Delsarte’s estimation far below its nobler cousin,lyric tragedy, as a theatrical form that could do justice to the highest forms of life,soul, and mind. The tragic figures of Hamlet and Medea offered the “superior anddefinite type” that synthesized “the scattered beauties of nature” rather than imitat-ing them. Delsarte’s approach emphasized the three-step process of acquaintance,possession, and free direction, effected by agents. These were bodily, mental, andspiritual tools by which the actor synthesized nature into the dramatic character.

We see most clearly the paradoxical character of Delsarte’s aesthetics – thatis, his tendency to return to ideas from Thomas Aquinas and other philosophersin order to assert the modern, revolutionary character of his aesthetics – in hisrejection of the actor’s reliance on reason. Instead, the actor must use his or herintelligence (intuition or instinct), which discovers reasons in nature. Delsarteoften illustrated this point with an account from his own experience. As a youngactor he had played a soldier encountering his mentor, whom he had not seenfor some time. Delsarte struggled to render the simple line, “Hello, PapaDugrand!” in a natural and convincing way. He had been taught to imitate histeachers’ pronunciation, tone, and gestures, but he could please neither histeachers nor himself. He found their approaches contradictory and oppressive,producing a “slavish and servile imitation” (Delsarte 1859: A124; trans. Levy1940: 23). Yet he struggled to reason out the reading of the line. He continues,

One day, I met a cousin whom I had not seen for a long time and I [said] to him withoutthinking: “Well, hello, cousin!” The involuntary gesture that I had made impresse[d] me … Inoticed that my body had had a movement of retroaction, that my eye had been mobile andnot fixed, that my shoulders were considerably raised. (Delsarte 1859: A124; Levy 1940: 24)




Delsarte maintains that, in order to render the line convincingly and move hisaudience, “it was necessary to be on guard against my reason, against my logic”(Delsarte 1859: A124; Levy 1940: 24). In observing his own gesture when greetinghis cousin, his body’s involuntary movement showed him nature, in this casethe sort of gesture he would commonly use. For Delsarte, the trained actor’schoice is based on insights he or she draws from observation of everydaybehavior rather than a reliance on logic. In some respects this approach seemspedestrian or naïve. American method acting, based on Stanislavsky’s influen-tial early work, has emphasized the need for a lengthy process of self-study onwhich the actor builds techniques for expressing emotion and rendering beha-vior. Yet Delsarte’s approach to acting also emphasized self-study in its ownway, along with analysis and technique.

Delsarte distrusted reason because he considered it a “purely discursivefaculty” (Delsarte 1859: A124), as did Aquinas, whose works he studied closely.In his 1870 essay “The Attributes of Reason” Delsarte asserts that “reason doesnot constitute a primary principle in man; for a primary principle could nevermistake its object” (Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 505). The primary principle in this caseis intelligence, the discursive form of which is reason:

Between reason and intelligence, although there be inclusion and co-essentiality in theseterms, there is a great difference in the mode of cognizance; for … intelligence is shown bysimple perception, and reason by the discursive process. Thus, while intelligence actssimply, as in knowing an intelligible truth by the light of its own intuition, reason goestoward its end progressively from one thing known to another not yet known. (Delsarte1892 [n.d.]: 513)

Delsarte drew on Aquinas’s definition of intelligence as “an intimate penetration oftruth” (Aquinas 1947–1948 [1269–1272]). Delsarte’s word “object” above refers toman’s origin and cause, God, who created reason in man as his “noblest power …free from subjection to the principle that enlightens it; free, too, to escape from it”(Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 505). Hence reason is subject to “error or possible blindness”;its potential genius lies in its “free and spontaneous subordination” to its object(Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 505). While intelligence serves as reason’s “principiant andguiding faculty” (Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 506), it is also flawed. When intelligence fails,reason “make[s] clear that which is not evident” (Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 508) orsupplements it, just as a telescope expands the visual reach of the human eye. Butthe telescope cannot be considered superior to the eye. Thus for Delsarte reason is anecessary but supplemental power; if mistaken as primary, it becomes dangerous,for it “frequently obscures even the very evidence itself” (Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 510).

Time-bound and imperfect, reason acquires knowledge, claims Delsarte;intelligence, not dependent upon experience, possesses it. (I will return to this




interesting term, possession, when I discuss the semiotics of the actor’s task.) Ifreason is properly illuminated by its principle, it can be exercised in three ways:common sense (reliance on others’ experience, or tradition); science, understoodas “train[ing] by personal experience to the knowledge of principles”; andwisdom, or “contemplation of principles and perfection of the intellect”(Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 514).

Delsarte measures the value of philosophical and scientific advances of hisday through this triadic lens. Nominalist framing of methods in the normativeand positive sciences Delsarte considers invalid because their purposes are notproperly framed in metaphysical terms. Instead he outlines a Thomist frameworkbased on doctrinal and a priori principles: “Man purifies himself by the con-stancy and fixedness of a way of living that contemplates his cause; he enlight-ens himself by the science and … wisdom of a mind that has clear intuition of hisprinciple, and he perfects himself in the light and warmth of a soul that aspiresto his purpose” (translated from Delsarte 1859: A134). For Delsarte scienceshould seek the light cast not only by intelligent inquirers who have comebefore, but crucially by man’s cause, principle, and object, which is God. Withthis aid human beings come to possess knowledge, rather than discover it. Inthis way Delsarte places himself in opposition to scientists who shaped conceptsof reason and inquiry within the limits of the physical world. Nor would Delsartefind acceptable Peirce’s realist views on truth and reality in regard to thenormative sciences. Truth, Peirce asserts in 1901,

is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endlessinvestigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract state-ment may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and thisconfession is an essential ingredient of truth. … Reality is that mode of being by virtue ofwhich the real thing is as it is, irrespectively of what any mind or any definite collection ofminds may represent it to be. (CP 5.565)

For Peirce, science advances by building on knowledge uncovered by previousinquirers. Principles, like the real thing, must be independent of what we mightthink them to be. Juxtaposed with this truly modern account of truth and reality,Delsarte’s adherence to existing doctrines seems less than scientific. Peircemight add that, as metaphysics can have no bearing on the normative or positivesciences, Delsarte’s metaphysical views have reduced his conception of scienceto an absurdity.

Susan Haack, building on the fourth of Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge lectures,summarizes four ways in which metaphysicians block inquiry: (1) “absoluteassertions,” (2) “claims that something can never be known,” (3) “claims thatsomething is utterly inexplicable,” and (4) “claims that a law or principle ‘has




found its last and perfect formulation’” (Haack 2014: 322). These are useful toolsfor a careful measuring of Delsarte’s commitment to scientific inquiry. As ametaphysician, Delsarte is guilty of all four at various points in his writings.As a practicing and teaching artist who encouraged his students to embrace theactor’s task as a form of inquiry, however, Delsarte seems to escape Haack’s fifthblock to the scientific attitude, which she calls “sham reasoning,” or “under-taking inquiry from other motives than the genuine desire to learn” (Haack 2014:327). Essential to the scientific attitude is the effort to replace false beliefs withnew ones: “We can filter out false beliefs more efficiently if we make the effort toimagine in which circumstances our experiences might force us to abandon ahypothesis, and then seek out those circumstances.” She suggests “going to theArctic, say, to check for non-black ravens, rather than searching temperateregions over and over; trying the experiment at very high and at very lowaltitudes rather than repeating it over and over at sea level; and so on” (Haack2014: 331). Abandoning his false belief in the methods of his conservatoryteachers, Delsarte set out to find and document the truth of human nature in away freed of hardened convention. In this sense, acting for Delsarte involves the“effort to imagine” circumstances in which the actor sees experience differently,and then to “seek out those circumstances” by creating them on stage.

3.3 Synthesizing embodied knowledge: The mechanismof applied aesthetics

From this perspective, and acknowledging the limits of his account of inquiry,let us not devalue Delsarte’s aesthetics or the historical importance of appliedaesthetics as the first systematic form of actor training. Through his three-stepprocess – observation, possession, and free direction – the actor seeks thesummum bonum of nineteenth-century aesthetic idealism. Delsarte, amongmany other artists, understood truth, goodness, and beauty to be one ideal,the parts of which are not separable in the work of art. A beautiful performanceis necessarily a moral and truthful one; “to call a work ugly,” as Toril Moi pointsout, “was to question its ethics as well as its aesthetics” (Moi 2006: 4). Inkeeping with his view that reason is a discursive, thus inferior, faculty,Delsarte emphasizes gesture as the most beautiful and thus the most truthfulform of expression. Truth is not a logical value for Delsarte, but it cannot bedismissed as a synonym for sincerity; it is best described as justesse – exactnessor appropriateness. In vocal performance, justesse passionelle meant exactnessunder the influence of the passions, or a performance in which tone, word, orgesture is directly connected to the performer’s internal state (Waille 2011: 470).




The actor’s gesture, in particular, has the potential to convey justesse. AsDelsarte’s idealist artist, the actor not only points the way to the ideal but alsoincarnates it. The actor far surpasses the scientist in importance due to his or herpotential ability to embody the ideal. The first step – observation or the gather-ing of knowledge through signs – is necessary but not sufficient. Next the actortakes possession – that is, he or she translates those observations into newlycreated signs – and then, in free direction, synthesizes that embodied knowledgein the creation of the role.

Elena Randi summarizes these three steps in practical terms that accordroughly with Waille’s account:

First the players define very precisely their gesture score based on the text interpretationdone earlier; then they repeat it so many times as to make it flow ‘automatically’; lastly,emotional involvement is triggered, which allows the execution of involuntary gestures …The players would really feel the emotions of their character[s] and feel them on demand,in a ‘scientific’ non-random way. (Randi 2012: 243)

Randi points out, though, Delsarte’s effort to recapture in performance the “twoseemingly irreconcilable categories” of self-awareness and involuntary gesture(2012: 243), or the lost world of Eden, in which “existed a non-mediated relation-ship between the psyche and gesture” (Randi 2012: 241). In Randi’s view Delsartesought to distinguish between such “genuine” signs and those worn and con-ventional signs offered by acting tradition. “The curtain was to open on afragment of heaven, on a portrait of the life existing before the corruptionbrought about by history and not, as according to a realistic provision, on atranche de vie; it should not have been the imitation of the ordinary, but thecopy of the archetype” (Randi 2012: 242).

Randi locates Delsarte’s modernity elsewhere in his teaching, as a unifyingmethod for the actor to offer a personal interpretation of the role. Choosing a“predominant word or expression” from the part,

the actor will go on to define the identifying sentences of each scene inwhich… the expression[appears] … Lastly, he will have to determine the sense underlying each single line, writingbeside each one the sentence that “translates” it, and each one will have to include the chosenkey-word. Thus, the actor will find himself with an elliptic translation of the part (today wewould call it a sub-text), characterized by a solid unitarity and pivoting around one dominantconcept radiated over multiple and variegated nuances. (Randi 2012: 244)

Randi contrasts this approach with the less exact art théatral taught by IsidoreSamson, a contemporary of Delsarte and a prominent teacher at the Écoleroyale, who sought to create “a suggestive climate which captures the player’simagination, dragging him/her into an atmosphere” (Randi 2012: 245). Such




reliance on inspiration was rejected by Delsarte, who perceived its contra-dictions. Because Samson advocated the actor’s adherence to the author’sview of the character, to which the teacher provided no certain access,Samson also provided no certain method for creating a unified character. Bycontrast, in a new and modern way Delsarte focused on “a gestural andpsychological dominant motive [that] shows the presence of a design madeup by each player according to a unifying overall perspective in the construc-tion of the part” (Randi 2012: 245–246). Thus Randi locates Delsarte amongthose acting teachers who in the 1830s anticipated certain aspects of a modernunified stage conception (Randi 2012: 247).

3.4 The role of séméiotique in the actor’s task

As a public figure in mid-nineteenth century Paris, Delsarte embodied bothresidual and emerging concepts of art. His aesthetics spoke most directly to aconservative element of French society that sought, as he did, to rescueideas from neglected traditions and resituate them for innovative, scientificapproaches to contemporary aesthetics. Embedded in his concept of reason,sign action and interpretation are necessary if secondary tools in Delsarte’saesthetics. Yet it is because of the paradoxes involved in his aesthetics, notin spite of them, that his ideas should be included in the history of modernsemiotics. His applied aesthetics incorporates an extensive system of signs,well known in Paris intellectual circles by the 1850s, as was his use of theterm séméiotique. Both precede by decades the earliest appearance ofPeirce’s theory of logic as semiotic and Saussure’s linguistics-basedsemiology.

Delsarte taught that language can only confirm what gesture conveys. Hisdiscussions of sign action appear, within his account of gesture, as three pointsof view on the human body: the static, the dynamic, and the semeiotic(séméiotique). The static and the dynamic – not my immediate concern here –involve harmonic oppositions in a performer’s stance and movement relating tothe adjacent space or performer; study from these viewpoints reveals the actionsof life and soul respectively. Semeiotic – my present concern – is that branch ofstudy devoted to mind and meaning:

The semeiotic presents to our scrutiny a triple object for study. It sets forth the cause of theacts produced by the dynamic and static harmonies. Moreover, it reveals the meaning ofthe types which form the object of the system. It offers to us a knowledge of the formal orconstitutional types, of the fugitive or accidental types, and, finally, of the habitual types.(Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 467).




Speaking of these types in terms of human development, Delsarte characterizesa formal or constitutional type as the “form assumed by the being at birth” or akind of potential. “Under the sway of custom forms undergo modifications,” hecontinues, producing habitual forms, which are conventional. The second type,or fugitive forms, which one might expect to intervene between potential andconvention, Delsarte actually situates as “[accidental or transitory] modificationsof the constitutional form, which are produced under the sway of passion”(Delsarte 1892 [n.d.]: 463). These seem to act as correctives to habitual under-standing, restoring mediated access to the Edenic archetype, as Randi hasexplained above. As in other parts of his applied aesthetics, Delsarte drew updetailed charts by which his students could identify types of gesture, and byextension the nature of the character expressed through them. Much has beenwritten on the difficulties these charts present, including some performers’tendency to replicate mechanically in their gestures what they perceived asmodels for imitation. As Delsarte notes, however, the types form the “objects”or the originating classes of phenomena perceived in examples from nature. Theactor, having learned the classifications, uses that knowledge to develop arelated, idealized type for performance. The translation from perceived object-type to idealized performance type, while not the creative culmination of theactor’s task, constitutes an essential part of it.

It appears that Delsarte drew his understanding of séméiotique as the science ofsigns primarily from medicine’s attention to the distinction between the signs andsymptoms of pathology, but he used the term in a broader sense: studying connec-tions between exterior signs and the person’s internal state (donnée interne, cf.Waille 2011: 466). As a student of human physiology, Delsarte sought to discoverevidence of intention or “the hidden source of action” (Jeannerod quoted in Waille2011: 466). In physiological terms, intention has a material reality manifested by theexterior sign (gesture, in this case), by which one can trace back the sign to thenerve-action within. Waille notes that Delsarte departs from the physiology of hisday to assert that intention, understood as nerve-action, has an ontological dimen-sion: “the signs of the body could reveal the inner being of the person, and not just apassing state” (Waille 2011: 466). Further, as nineteenth-century physiology dis-tances itself from metaphysical causes, Delsarte persists in analyzing movement inreference to the soul, or, as Élisabeth Schwartz-Rémy puts it, “an internal process ofactive being” (quoted in Waille 2011: 466) in which intention is anchored. Thusphysical movement begins within and is fulfilled through the powers, faculties, andagencies of the embodied individual. Analysis of movement and the discovery ofintention, also part of séméiotique, begin externally with the visible sign andproceed to interpretation of “interior invisible movements.” Using Saussure’s ter-minology, Waille calls this aspect of Delsarte’s séméiotique “a catching up of the




signifier to the signified; it ‘will express the reason for being of those movements’.”(Waille 2011: 467) Waille’s expression “catching up” (remontée) is instructive, buthis Saussurean vocabulary constrains a full explanation of the triadic character ofDelsarte’s version of semiosis. Peirce’s account of the sign relation (while notreferring to Delsarte) does better justice to the physical and metaphysical dimen-sions of Delsarte’s thinking:

A Sign is a Cognizable that, on the one hand, is so determined… by something other than itself,called its Object…while, on the other hand, it so determines some actual or potentialMind, thedetermination whereof I term the Interpretant created by the Sign, that that Interpreting Mindis therein determined mediately by the Object. (Peirce 1909, EP 2: 492)

Just as Delsarte’s object, considered as a final cause, bears some resemblance toPeirce’s Object, it is possible to find in séméiotique glimpses of a concept ofmediate determination. Delsarte proposes that not only does the sign determinemeaning, but in the course of the actor’s task the sign “catches up” with itsoriginating intention and the principle that illuminates it. In this sense theobserving actor can possess and translate the intention, rooted in “invariablesof the psycho-spiritual order in a multiplicity of expressive human situations”(Waille 2011: 467).

In order to apply Delsarte’s aesthetics successfully, actors must be thor-oughly versed in séméiotique. At that point opens the opportunity for freedirection, or the actor’s spontaneous creation and combination of signs. Thistype of acting, many Delsarte followers believed, can do justice to humanbeings’ infinite variety. Creativity relies on séméiotique and builds the charac-ter’s inner life with it. As Delsarte asserted, art aims to take possession of all theelements that constitute human being: to excite the senses, interest the mind,and persuade the heart (Delsarte 1859: A129).

4 Conclusion

Just as Delsarte has garneredmore attention from theatre scholars in recent years, sohis ideas on sign action deserve scrutiny from those interested in science-basedsemiotics. Current investigations of mind-body interaction, such as AntonioDamasio’s research in neuroscience, employ twenty-first-century methods thatrefer back to nineteenth-century studies in psychology, physiology, and pathologyand thus continue that inquiry into the body’s role in cognition. As Damasioremarks, “the most stable aspects of body function are represented in the brain, inthe form of maps, thereby contributing images to the mind” (Damasio 2010: 21).Building on work done on mirror-neurons, Damasio continues,




The network in which those neurons are embedded achieves conceptually what I hypothesizedas the as-if body loop system: the simulation, in the brain’s body-maps, of a body state that isnot actually taking place in the organism … [T]he brain’s representation of the body [impliesthat,] because we can depict our own body states, we can more easily simulate the equivalentbody states of others. (Damasio 2010: 110–111)

According to Damasio, representation leads to simulation, which creates thepossibility for empathy. He suggests that consciousness produced by the map-ping effected by mirror neurons leads to an embodied sociality of thought.Damasio’s humanist conception of the self, as an effect of coordinated opera-tions between brain and nervous system, harks back to Delsarte’s focus on theactor, whose manifestations of feeling create interpretable signs of unifiedcharacter.

Can it be argued that within Delsarte’s aesthetic idealism there lay the begin-ning of the modern concept of the sign relation as mediated? I would offer aqualified yes. To date I have found no diagram of a sign relation in Delsarte’swritings, despite an abundance of charts outlining the signifying agencies ofindividual parts of the body. The word séméiotique appears only in regard to thescience of gesture, not of language or voice. In fact, Delsarte may not have con-ceived of sign action as a complete triadic relation in Peirce’s sense. Delsarte’saccount of the actor’s task outlines a three-step process, but he is not concerned, asPeirce will be, with the sign relation as the foundational element in thought. Rather,thought and body-life serve feeling, or the soul. Later, after 1870, when AmericanDelsartists began to build on applied aesthetics, it appears that semiosis as acomplete triadic relation emerged in their thinking, even as Peirce was developingand refining his own account.

In an 1890 collection of Delsartist recitation exercises appears an image of theyoung François Delsarte playfully scratching signs in the sand with a stick (Wilbor1890: xiii). This image represents an iconic moment in the myth of Delsarte’s life andcareer, when the boy – often portrayed in American publications as homeless andhungry but with a genius for music – is notating a melody being played by anorchestra just out of view. The gentleman observing is Father Bambini, who recog-nizes Delsarte’s artistic genius, takes him home, and tutors him in music. ForDelsarte the boy’s notating might depict a Thomist act of intelligence, when obser-vation gives way to possession, and thence to an act of creativity. I read this scene alittle differently, as a scene in the history of science-based semiotics. The notatingconstituted a form of semiosis in which the young Delsarte, intrigued by the musiche hears, is seen engaging bodily in the play of musement. For Peirce, inquiry beginswith creative moments such as these – when the reality of our world captures ourattention and produces emotional, physical, and intellectual responses, many ofthem signs.




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The role of séméiotique in François Delsarte's aesthetics

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